We all have seen a rainbow occasionally in our daily lives during or following a rain shower and must have wondered the reason for this. Most of us, if not all, as a child must have been excited to see a rainbow in the sky and marvel at its splendid beauty and wondered where it came from. Rainbows have always fascinated humans ever since the early days and such; they have been the subject of songs, poems, stories and mythology. In Norse mythology, the rainbow is the road between the worlds of gods and men. The Greeks used to believe that it was a sign from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain. Indians believed that it was a bridge between life and dead and the Irish believed that a pot of gold lies at the end of a rainbow. It is also mentioned in the Holy Bible in The book of Genesis that the rainbow is the sign of covenant between God and all life on Earth. I’m sure some of us as adults today still have no answer to how a rainbow is formed.
A rainbow is an arc of light separated into bands of color that appear when the Sun's rays are refracted and reflected by drops of mist or rain. The colors of the rainbow are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. These are the full spectrum of colors that make up the sun's white light. A rainbow is a multicolored arc of light in sky.
The colors are produced by something called dispersion. When white light passes through a prism, it scatters the different colors of light according to their wavelength or frequencies, showing a continuous band of colors as it travel from one medium to another. These different colors of light have all slightly different directions and so display each color components of white light. Thus, the angle of bending is different for different wavelengths of light. This band of colors appears in the same pattern as the colors of a rainbow. This means, all the different colors of light combine to give you what is called white light. These colors, based on their wavelength, are...